Damage of goods in transportation is a major problem in the field of logistics. When a shipment is received in a damaged condition, there are usually no possibilities to track when the damage occurred, which turns the question of liability into an open question.
Further, intrusion and tamper events, such as illegal opening and/or modification of the content of the shipment are major concerns when handling valuable or sensitive goods. Theft, where valuable items are removed and stolen from the shipment is one aspect and another is illegal modification of a shipment's content. If a receiver claims that a shipment was not received in an expected condition, the sender cannot resolve if the receiver fraudulently claims that a theft or damage is due to an event in the logistics chain.
Another aspect of logistics is concerns about a shipment's contents and origin at time of arrival to the receiver. The origin and contents of a shipment is normally identified by an address label, which generally cannot not be verified and authenticated by the receiver.
Rising concerns about possible hazardous contents of alien shipments, where contents may include explosives, poison, biological agents etc. poses a major threat for organizations and employees at time of arrival.
Traditional means of ensuring the integrity and authenticity of a shipment include different types of sealing, where a tamper event can be visually detected at time of arrival. Holograms, lacquer sealing, security printing and other traditional methods of ensuring an item's authenticity is generally not strong enough to withstand today's sophisticated methods of counterfeiting and fraud.
Automation of logistics typically include means machine readable labels, such as bar codes, data matrix codes, RFID-tags etc., where information about the shipment can be read and processed by a host computer system. Current solutions generally provide little or no means of active authentication of the label itself. Any attempt to illegally copy, modify or move the label should be detected as an integrity violation.
In summary, it would be desirable to be able to verify the origin, integrity and authenticity of the shipment at time of arrival to the receiver in an automated, highly secure and dependable way. In the case of an integrity violation, it would be desirable to timestamp the event; enabling tracking where in the logistics chain the event occurred.